August 10, 2016

There's a kind of food I have been seeing in anime ever since I first started
watching it.

It's a single bone, with symmetrical lobes on both ends. And it's
surrounded in the middle with red meat.

So what's wrong with that? There ain't no such beast! There is no such bone
on a mammal skeleton. The fibula and tibia have a lot of meat but it's all on
one side, and it's two bones together rather than one. (And neither of them is
shaped like that, anyway.) The radius and ulna are symmetrically surrounded by
meat, but again it's two bones together and neither of them are shaped like
that. The femur and the humerus don't have symmetrical lobes like that. And
that's it for long bones; there aren't any others.

It always bugs me when I see it; where do the artists think that bone is
coming from?

2
So I got a very "Flintstones" vibe off of that, but an image search is only pulling up relatively plausible cuts of meat in actual screencaps of the show, be it roasted whole bird, cuts of steak, or plausible-enough drumsticks.

So I feel like I've only deepened the mystery; I "know" I've seen it in American cartoons, but all the evidence I collected was to the contrary. (But I hardly expect a couple of Google image searches to completely index the Flintstones. Still, honestly compels me to admit the evidence is all against my "knowledge".)

July 21, 2016

It isn't a grand old Flag

A nation's flag is important. It represents the nation, it leads men into
battle. Men have died for flags, not just rhetorically, but literally. The raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi is one of the most iconic news photographs of the last century, and it's especially poignant since some of those men didn't live out the day.

A flag should mean something; it should represent the country. The US flag's
meaning is well known: 13 stripes representing the original 13 colonies of the
revolution, and a star in the upper left corner for every state. Which means
that every time we add states, the flag changes, which last happened in 1959
when Alaska and Hawaii became states.

A flag doesn't have to be complex to be meaningful. The flag of Japan is a
simple red circle on a white background, but it represents the rising sun, which
has always been Japan's identity as the Land of the Rising Sun. And it's a noble flag.

I like the Union Jack. It is made up of the Flag of St. George representing
England and Wales, the flag of St. Andrew representing Scotland, and the flag of
St. Patrick representing Ireland. (Which could have become a sick joke in 1921,
but isn't because Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom.)

These are flags with meaning, symbols that are symbolic. I've never felt that
way about a lot of the flags of Europe; too many of them look like they were
stitched out of spare rags from the nearest tailor shop and if they have any
kind of symbolic meaning I never figured out what it was. This has bothered me
my whole life!

So let's try a quiz, shall we: What countries are these flags?

How many millions of men have died for these prosaic rags? And if they do
have any kind of meaning, it's probably something like "Habsburgs
Forever!"

(I've left the nation names as filenames on those pictures.)

Why is it that so many national flags in Europe are just two or three panels
of solid colors, horizontal or vertical? Seems like there's a bunch of
"...well, they're doing it!" going on here, and that's a hell
of a reason for creating a symbol that men will die for. Pfeh.

And if they do have any kind of meaning, it's probably something like "Habsburgs Forever!"

In the case of Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg emperors were essentially the only thing keeping the Dual Monarchy together. In fact, the phrase 'For God and Kaiser" was always used in the same way a country's name was used elsewhere.

It is also hard to imagine that until the unification of the German states, it was the post-revolutionary French flag that was guaranteed to bring bad memories when it appeared in other European nations.

Posted by: cxt217 at July 21, 2016 05:14 PM (EvxH9)

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I can't speak for most of the flags, but orange, being rarely used in flags, tends to have a very important meaning. It's odd that the Irish flag despite being the three vertical stripe pattern thus has some recognizable meaning to it.

There are also cases where the people that designed the flag tried to create some fancy symbolic meaning and ended up with something ugly. Take the South African flag, for example.

A flag doesn't have to be complicated in order to be worthwhile. The Canadian flag is relatively simple, with only two colors, but it's very memorable and there isn't any confusion at all about what it means and which country it's from.

On the other hand, the flag of Ivory Coast is the same as the flag of Ireland except flipped horizontally. Why?

4
The former Soviet Union's was distinctive. It seems the new Russian flag wanted to go the opposite direction.

Posted by: muon at July 21, 2016 11:51 PM (IUHrD)

5
I think the reason is that many countries in Europe are traditionally monarchies, so the flags will just be the colours of the royal family. Also I think a lot of them are old enough that they weren't really designed the way more modern flags are. In relatively modern times it would be unthinkable to have a design that doesn't mean something, but this was likely less the case many centuries ago. For instance, Wikipedia says that the origin of the Dutch flag may date back as far as the 9th century, when that region of Charlemagne's empire was associated with cloth in those colours.

I think prefer a simple design (I admit to not even liking the maple leaf on the Canadian flag.) over complex designs. If every nation in Europe that still had a monarchy adopted the royal house's arms on their flag, it would make the different designs a veritable nightmare of squinting at what is on the flag when there is an international event.

That said, the simple red and white stripe of the Polish flag needs no other complexity. Straight and to the point - and if you ever need to see it on a battlefield, there will be no mistaking for it.

Posted by: cxt217 at July 22, 2016 01:04 PM (EvxH9)

7
The current flag of Russian Federation is not in a sense new. It was invented by Peter The Great when he saw that every European nation had a flag, and so he came up with this. Originally it was purely for naval purposes, to be flown from ships. Oddly enough, it was quickly adopted as a general flag of Russian state in all departments, but the Russian Navy somehow migrated to so-called "St. Andrey", which has an X-shaped design. Versions of that are specifically associated with combat or least armed forces. You could see a ton of them in Novorossia flown from vehicles for ForF identification.

June 15, 2016

I just ran into a new term I had never seen before: "Toxic Masculinity". I'm not even sure what it means, but I suspect it means "Men who refuse to act like women."

Apparently it's important because it was one of the things that was responsible for the Orlando slaughter, at least according to this poster on Metafilter.

There are lots of reasons why this individual was radicalized and chose his victims and why he was able to do so much harm before being stopped.

Guns
Homophobia
Radicalization
Toxic Masculinity
Etc

All of these probably contributed to this event and all of them will continue to be massive issues once the headlines fade.

I have to believe that things will get better that tolerance will eventually win out or we will get tired of innocent people getting killed but I have to say I am getting really tired of people using violence as a way of lashing out at the world for whatever grievances they have real or imagined.

I am sick of young men because most of the time it's young men perpetrating these types of crimes feeling that they have the right to kill people because they are so mad at the world for whatever reason.

I understand being angry and mad but I am sick of this culture of entitlement that seemingly encourages young men to take out their rage on innocent people just trying to live their lives. I know that there are often various reasons these young men lash out but I have to believe that the constant cycle of violence is indicative of something deeply wrong in our society that is telling people that this sort of violence is somehow okay.

Our society. Our society. No indication here that the guy who shot up that bar was from a different society, nor what society it was.

How the hell are we supposed to win a war when we're not even permitted to name the enemy in the war? This isn't just a Democrat thing, either. Bush started it with his constant claim that "Islam is a religion of peace" and other aphorisms just as stupid. It's a leadership problem, leadership on both sides of the aisle.

The leadership doesn't trust the population. They fear us more than they fear the enemy, because they think we're stupid and uninformed. They feel nothing but contempt for us.

And that's why off-the-wall candidates have done so well this year. The population knows how the leadership feels and it's responding in kind. This backlash was long in coming, but I really hope it's now unstoppable.

Toxic masculinity is one of the ways in which Patriarchy is harmful to men. It refers to the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.

I might have known...

UPDATE: So Toxic Masculinity refers to all men who are not metrosexuals. Great.

1
It's gotten to the point where all I can say is, I just defend this country. I don't pretend to understand it.

Posted by: CatCube at May 21, 2016 03:16 PM (fa4fh)

2
It could be worse. The GOP Senate just confirmed a 'fabulous' guy to be the new Secretary of the Army, who has expressed, as one of his primary motivations in office, as increasing the number of transgender members in the Army (The quoted list of his priorities as given during his confirmation hearings had exactly one bullet point that should actually be a priority for a SecArmy.).

Posted by: cxt217 at May 21, 2016 05:13 PM (Zoe4h)

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The only saving grace there is that the current Secretary of Defense doesn't seem to be an SJW-idiot, and the Secretary of the Army works for him. But it's not much of a consolation given that the Secretary of Defense works for the President.

But it's not much of a consolation given that the Secretary of Defense works for the President.

That is the major problem (Aside from the difference that I have far less confidence in Ashton Carter than you do.). Unless you have a Melvin Laird as SecDef (And while Laird was not the worst SecDef ever - Louis Johnson holds that position and is a classic example of why officials should be glad we do not put incompetent and stupid ones on trial, because Johnson would have been shot for what he was guilty of - he was still an awful SecDef.), it will be a good company/party man in the position. So whenever SecDef is occupied by an 'adult' in an administration of children (Like how Robert Gates was likened in the Obama Administration.), all that happens is that the SecDef becomes an enabler and excuse-maker for the administration, akin to an adult enabler handing out alcohol and car keys to the underage children in the room. Robert Gates is a perfect example of the phenomena and his post-administration attempts at trying to spin away his responsibilities for the mess he allowed to happen is unconvincing, to say the least.

And yes, I hate to say, but I rank Leon Panetta as a better SecDef than Gates, because Panetta, for all his problems, was more willing to fight for the military than Gates ever did.

One of Obummer's greatest accomplishments (and I use the term ironically) is the hollowing out of the remains of our military. We now have the military of the WWII Germans and Japanese. Great stuff, but not enough of it. They lost against opponents that could throw more men and material at them, and were in the end, more results-oriented.

My liberal friend sees the Air Force scrounging for parts, and says "good thing! They need to learn to live within a budget!" I see a force that has to be sensitive to the loss of a single plane; a force that will shatter when it starts taking real losses in, you know, a war.

6
I'm not entirely convinced that we're in the same situation that we were in the Cold War, where we needed to maintain a vast military that was constantly ready to take on a gigantic foe.

Fact is, anyone who's got the military to make us even -reach- a war footing also has nuclear weapons. We're not going to get into a knock-down, drag-out, commit-everything fight with the Russians because of MAD, and that isn't dependent on us having a massive superiority in n-th generation fighter planes. Ditto for China though in their case our biggest deterrent is naval, and you can't really say we've been skimping there (especially in comparison to potential opposition!)

It's worth saying that we should probably change some of our military procurement away from "the absolute best performance money can buy, if you're willing to spend a billion bucks on a plane" and more towards "cheap and cheerful" that we can have a large inventory of on the cheap. We don't need the F-22 to take on guys driving converted pickup trucks.

I do think that if we're going to draw down forces, we should also pull in some of our security commitments as well.

I'm not entirely convinced that we're in the same situation that we were in the Cold War, where we needed to maintain a vast military that was constantly ready to take on a gigantic foe.

On the contrary, given the disappearance of a single, monolithic opponent, the US military probably needs to be larger than most people think to handle the variety of threats either present or on the horizon.

It is ironic that having just one major foe may actually make military spending 'efficient' because you only have to deal with that single foe.

Fact is, anyone who's got the military to make us even -reach- a war footing also has nuclear weapons. We're not going to get into a knock-down, drag-out, commit-everything fight with the Russians because of MAD,

You would hope so - but reality have a disagreeable tendency to prove wrong. In any case, depending on the possession of nukes to stop war from beginning at all in place of conventional forces, was a bad idea when Eisenhower was cutting conventional forces because his plan was to let theater commanders use nuclear weapons in extremis. It has not gotten any better now.

That is not even getting to how limited war scenarios (i.e. against nations whose military is not as capable as ours'.) can generate shocks. Argentina was suppose to be a limited war opponent to the United Kingdom in the Falklands War - yet it was the British that got shocked.

and that isn't dependent on us having a massive superiority in n-th generation fighter planes.

Except that the American way of making war (As well as to keep war from our coast and in the enemies' den.) depends almost entirely air and naval superiority. Given the European tendency to sell their best weapons to the highest bidder, and the money that the PRC is investing in their air force, I would not want to go in confidence with this belief.

And since air forces have to prepare for what the likely threats will have down the road, being complacent with F-15s and F-16s is not a good idea.

Ditto for China though in their case our biggest deterrent is naval, and you can't really say we've been skimping there (especially in comparison to potential opposition!)

Except we are skimping on the Navy. The Navy is facing almost a big a shortfall as the Air Force is - not helped by the Navy being obscured by the other armed forces since the end of the Cold War. In any case, both the Navy and Air Force are needed against the PRC - and both are hurting the most right now.

It's worth saying that we should probably change some of our military procurement away from "the absolute best performance money can buy, if you're willing to spend a billion bucks on a plane" and more towards "cheap and cheerful" that we can have a large inventory of on the cheap. We don't need the F-22 to take on guys driving converted pickup trucks.

We can definitely change how procurement is handled, but if you structure your entire force around the cheap on the assumption that you will be taking on no one except guys in technicals for the next twenty years, the next time you actually get into a fight with a decent air force will be the moment when you wish you had the F-22s to back you up. That is not even getting to the part where you have to explain to the guy or girl killed while operating the cheap fighter why you did not send them out in the best that money can buy...

I do think that if we're going to draw down forces, we should also pull in some of our security commitments as well.

That would be nice, except the Real World (TM) usually refuses to cooperate. Shades of the quote attributed to Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you."

April 26, 2016

Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny died about 20 years ago, and has frustrated me before and ever since, because he left so many things unfinished. Zelazny was the Writer's Block poster child.

This afternoon I purchased "Madwand" for my Kindle. It's the second volume of a trilogy, the first of which was called "Changeling". We'll never know what the third volume was going to be named, because he never wrote it.

And he never finished the second Amber series. It just kind of ends, not quite with a cliff-hanger but nearly so.

Zelazny was 58 when he died in 1995, and I'm sure he would rather have stayed alive and kept writing, but that's not how it worked out.

Jack Chalker is another of my favorite authors, who wrote a lot of multi-volume stories. He's dead now, too (he was morbidly obese) but when he began work on a multi-volume story, he had all the volumes planned out before he began writing the first one, and he cranked straight through until he had finished the last one -- and didn't work on anything else in the mean time. Sometimes he would come back and visit a canon later (like the fourth and fifth books of the Dancing Gods series) but you can easily ignore those and not miss anything.

But Zelazny danced around and worked on all sorts of things. He was badly afflicted by squirrel-brain.

And in the first Amber series, it's obvious he didn't really have the whole thing worked out in detail before he began. (In particular, he changed his mind about the source of the Black Road. There are two mutually exclusive explanations for it.)

One reason he didn't finish the second Amber series was that he got distracted by working on a computer game, during development of which he died.

One of the worst things an author can do to his audience is to not finish a story, leaving it hanging. And though Madwand is a reasonably self-contained story that hangs together pretty well, it's obvious the story is not over and I want to know what comes next. I've wanted to know for 35 years.

He wrote Changeling in 1980 and Madwand in 1981 and never came back to it in the remaining 14 years of his life. Grumble.

1
The lack of a followup to Madwand always annoyed me, but frankly, I thought the second Amber series got a mercy killing. When book 3 not only didn't finish it, but generated new plot points at an alarming rate, I lowered my expectations.

There's apparently a brief hint about the book that would have completed Pol's story, Deathmask, in volume 5 of the short story collection.

3
No kidding. I've got a policy now that I don't start multi-book series unless they're already finished.
And I was so pissed off that the description of "The Golden Compass" didn't even bother mentioning that it was part 1 of the never completed story. Didn't even end in a cliff hanger, it just... stopped.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at April 27, 2016 01:33 AM (l55xw)

4
I never bought the 6-volume short-story collection (I leave it on my Christmas list at Amazon, just in case...), so I don't know, and no one seems to have said anything online. Just the title and the fact that it's mentioned in there somewhere.

Still, if a complete Zelazny novel can turn up decades later (The Dead Man's Brother, which his agent had just forgotten about), maybe someday someone will go through his papers and find some story notes.

5
Louis L'Amour never wrote a follow up to The Walking Drum, which follows an adventurer in the 12th century Europe and Middle East. It's supposed to be a trilogy with our hero going all the way from Brittany all the way to China. He passed away before the second book (supposed to take place going to India, and third book, China).

Posted by: BigFire at April 28, 2016 12:04 PM (O7l6D)

6
Everyone dies eventually and if it's an author who writes multi-volume series, it's not surprising if he leaves one storyline dangling. My issue with Zelazny is that he left several unfinished.

8
At least WoT got an ending, albeit he left so many notes on plot points that it took an additional 3 books instead of 1 (not terribly surprising, given how the whole thing went from 7 (planned) to 13).

It also introduced me to Sanderson, so there's that, too.

I read Changeling when I was younger; it was decent, if a bit short. I'm not sure if I want to read the sequel or not, knowing that it will never be followed up on.

The only two L'Amour books I ever read (and loved both) were his non-westerns. After his death, there were rumors of material left behind for sequels to both of them, but those rumors faded over the years as nothing ever happened. Quite a pity, both depicted Odyssey-esque journeys that left me starving for more.

April 23, 2016

Shakespeare

That's a reproduction of the enscription on Shakespeare's grave stone.

400 years ago today, Shakespeare died. Widely considered the greatest playwright in the English language, his works are widely performed, widely studied, and widely read -- except not in most university English departments anymore which seem to be dedicated to eradicating any notion of worthiness of any Dead White Male™.

Revisionism is rampant when it comes to his works. This isn't anything new; in the 19th Century a man named Thomas Bowdler published a book called "The Family Shakspeare" (sic) which removed all the worst violence from Shakespeare's plays. (He then gave his name to the term "bowdlerize".)

But modern revisionists are mostly concerned with Race, Class, and Gender™. And there's one particular revision that has grated with me for 30 years. I'm going to take this opportunity to gripe about it.

"The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice" is now known usually as just Othello. And it has become accepted wisdom in theatrical circles that the part of Othello must be played by a Negro. Every effort is made to avoid mention of the fact that Shakespeare thought that Othello was a Moor.

See, the problem is that Moors were Caucasian, not Negro. The historical dividing line between Caucasians and Negros was the Sahara desert, not the Mediterranean. Revisionists (such as the radical "Afrocentrists") try to lay claim to northern Africa on behalf of Negros, despite the fact that the only Negros historically north of the Sahara were slaves.

That's because the majority of important African political, scientific, and cultural contributions to the world came from the part of Africa north of the Sahara.

I don't care who actually did it; I just care about the fact that our intellectual betters seem to feel it necessary to lie about it. Nearly everything like that came either from Egyptians, Greek conquerers, Roman conquerers, or Arab conquerers -- and all of those were Caucasian.

I don't think caucasians are in any way superior to any other race, not that it would help any for me to say that. Anyone inclined that way has instantly decided I'm a racist and probably piled a whole lot of other negative adjectives onto that description.

What I care about is being honest. Shakespeare thought that Othello was caucasian. The modern attitude seems to be "Who cares what he thought? He only wrote the play."

That doesn't mean I think Othello shouldn't be played by a Negro actor. You cast whoever you think can give the best performance. It means I think you might also cast a non-Negro if you think he would give the best performance, and you don't worry about political correctness.

UPDATE: Another one that I find really grating: "The most beautiful woman in history was African." I thought Helen of Troy was Greek. "NO, no, no... Cleopatra!"

I've heard that from people who didn't really know anything about Cleopatra other than she was a queen in Egypt when Julius Caesar conquered the place for the Romans. The problem is, Cleopatra was part of the Ptolemy dynasty.

The Ptolemy's were descended from a Greek general who was made governor of Egypt by Alexander after he conquered Egypt. Alexander then left to travel to the east, conquering every nation along his way, until he died in India. At which point all the governors he had left behind effectively became kings of their respective states, and so it was with the Ptolemy's.

The Ptolemy's and other Greeks who ruled Egypt during that period still considered themselves to be Greek, and they continued to rule Egypt for 300 years right up until Caesar showed up and the Romans took over.

So it's true that Cleopatra was African, in the sense that she was born in Africa and lived her whole life there, but that doesn't have anything whatever to do with the part of Africa south of the Sahara or the people who live there.

History is what happened. It shouldn't be rewritten to fit a modern ideology. We harm ourselves when we lie to ourselves about how we became what we are. We must face the truth, warts and all.

6
That "[sic]" is unnecessary, assuming you're using it to hint that Bowdler misspelled the playwright's name. "William Shakspeare" was actually the name he signed to his will. Spelling of words and names wasn't as frozen back then.

January 17, 2016

Season to taste

OreIda makes bags of Tater Tots, and I buy them. Half a bag makes a good dinner. You pour them onto a cookie sheet, put them into a preheated oven and bake for 19 minutes and then, according to the bag, "season to taste".

Which means put salt on them, but they can't say that. Potatoes without salt taste like library paste and everyone uses salt on them. Except certain bureaucrats in Washington who create dietary recommendations for the peasants, which recommendations I stopped paying attention to a long time ago. Because it became clear to me that it was food faddism, not science. And now everyone can tell, because in the last few years the official recommended diet has changed quite a lot.

Butter is back on the OK list. So are eggs. Studies have finally shown that cholesterol isn't a synonym for cyanide. And after decades of saying "Reduce dietary fat; eat carbs instead" because they thought all of us were too fat, now it's been revealed that it's carbs that do that, not fat.

But still it goes on. The NYC commission, who have nothing else important to work on since NYC is an ideal city with no problems, no crime, and no other issues, anyway the commission considered a city regulation forbidding anyone in the city from putting salt in their food before sale.

Among other problems, a bunch of bakers went to the commission to inform them that you cannot make bread without salt because the yeast won't rise. Details, details... (I don't think they passed that regulation, in the end. Anyway, all it would have done is force all those companies to move their factories and bakeries to Hoboken.)

My zoology prof in college talked to us about salt one time. This was about 1974, before things got crazy, but he mentioned that when our salt levels get low we really crave salt and our food won't taste right unless we put a lot more salt on than we usually would. (This is most common in hot weather when you've been sweating.) Different people have different desires for salt at different times, which is why restaurants put salt shakers on the tables. They tend to undersalt the food and rely on the customers to adjust "to taste".

But the food freaks think they know everything (despite proof from experience that they're idiots) and the latest fad is food with no salt in it, proudly blazed on the label. John Kovalic did a nice job on that with his comic "CTRL SALT DEL".

That happened to me one time. I wasn't paying attention to the labels and I bought a jar of peanut butter with no salt added. One taste and I knew my mistake. I ended up having to add a LOT of salt to it to get it to taste like anything. It took me three tries, adding more salt each time and then stirring the jar up, to get it to taste right.

It's one more aspect of the encroaching nanny state, and I say this: you will take my salt shaker away from me when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers.

Sounds more like a Mike Bloomberg initiative - all the more ironic since Bloomberg is known to use so much salt on his popcorn that it would burn the lips, and his chef always included a salt shaker with the popcorn.

Of course, New York State gave us the state senator who introduced a bill banning salt from dishes served in restaurants, despite saying in an interview that he liked salt on his food and wanted it on the dishes he ordered.

Posted by: cxt217 at January 17, 2016 07:48 PM (H7pmS)

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Many, many moons ago (when I was a young Army officer in the beginning of the 1980's), I got the additional duty of "dining facility officer".

That meant that I ran the battalion mess hall. Well, I was the Officer In Charge of the mess hall; my sergeant actually ran it. I still kept an eye on what was going on.

Since I was the OIC, I read up on all the Army Field Manuals on the feeding of troops. One of the more interesting items in the manuals was a discussion on the amount of fat required in a meal; it appears that a certain level of fat is required for the brain to believe that the body has consumed sufficient calories (i.e. to feel satiated).

Knowing that and looking at a low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet leaves me rather unsurprised at the fat levels of the US population.

January 08, 2016

A man named Archer bushwacked a police car in Philadelphia yesterday and fired 13 shots at the cop named Hartnett from point blank range, hitting him 3 times. (Which is really shitty shooting.)

The gun he used had previously been stolen from a policeman. (That's all we know about it, but obviously there are many important questions remaining.)

After calling for help and despite his wounds, Officer Hartnett gave chase and shot Archer, with much better aim. Hartnett's wound were serious but not life threatening, which is a blessing. Archer's wounds were much more serious but also don't appear to be life threatening, which maybe isn't a blessing.

Archer readily confessed to the shooting and claimed that he did it for Islam, on behalf of ISIS.

All of which is sufficiently idiotic, but here's where it gets really maddening.

Mayor Jim Kenney announced that the shooting wasn't motivated by Islam, despite the fact that Archer himself said it was.

I think it's time to retire the phrase "Islam is a religion of peace." I always found that supremely annoying and it hasn't aged well. Back in 2001 it sounded like naivety, but now it sounds like a Big Lie, one that the speaker himself doesn't believe but which he hopes will convince stupid people like us if only they repeat it often enough.

I've always thought it extremely presumptuous for outsiders to explain to people who follow any religion how their religion actually demands that they behave, or for outsiders to try to claim things about that religion that its adherents don't agree with. Lefties do this all the time with Christianity, and though I'm not a Christian I find it really annoying.

But people like Kenney claiming Islam is a religion of peace is even worse. It's not that they expect to influence Muslims with that drivel.

The worst fear of Our Betters is that all of us redneck knuckle draggers will rise up mob-like and start attacking Muslims, burning their places of worship and throwing rocks through the windows of Halal butcher shops and so on.

This is the nightmare for Our Betters, the one thing which must be avoided at all costs. Nothing else is as important -- like protecting the majority from random attacks. That one is well down the charts.

So every time there's an attack like this by someone who is clearly motivated by jihad, whether a lone crackpot or part of an organized force, they always announce that it had nothing to do with Islam. Kenney thinks he knows more about what motivated Archer than Archer himself, and has told us so. Archer claims he shot the policeman for the greater glory of Islam, but Kenney says that wasn't the real reason.

Just thinking about Mayor Kenney is making me feel like screaming.

Folks, it's crap like this which is driving people into Trump's arms. He may be strange; he may even be lying about what he intends. But he's the only high-profile politician who is saying what so many people are thinking. He refuses to play by the unwritten rules of Political Correctness, and every time he says something which sends lefties to their fainting couches, his ratings in the polls rise again. American voters have had it will the Prevailing Wisdom and they're looking for someone, even someone as flamboyant as The Donald, who will acknowledge these things.

I have no idea who will win the 2016 presidential election, let alone who will be the candidates. But if Trump wins either, this will be the reason why. Americans are tired of being talked down to and lied to.

There are peaceful Muslims. Millions of them. But there are also very violent Muslims, and that isn't coincidence.

First rule: The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists.
Second rule: The vast majority of terrorists are Muslims.

December 18, 2015

Grumble grumble

One of my biggest beefs with Starbucks is that they have taught everyone that the proper way to roast coffee is to stop just before it catches fire. Everything is over-roasted these days. I've been trying different brands of coffee trying to find one that isn't roasted too much, and I just found one. The Safeway house brand "breakfast blend" actually tastes like coffee, not like charcoal.

Why in hell does everyone seem to want me to create an account and log in? UPS just changed their web site so that you can't see when your package is expected to be delivered unless you log in first. Why in hell do I need to log in for that? I didn't used to.

There are a lot of reasons why I resent HorribleSubs, but maybe the biggest is the way they say, "This is brought to you by the HorribleSubs fansubbing team". Horseshit! Maybe there's a team, but the subbing is being done by Crunchyroll and Funimation. I wish they'd be more honest about what they're doing -- or perhaps "less dishonest" would be more to the point. I guess there has to be a team, because there's no damned way a single person could do all the stuff they do. But they don't sub anything.

2
I'm sadly familiar with the coffee problem. We found that Whole Foods sell passable coffee, in particular Colombian. Our latest workaround is to order from one of gourmet places. I can't seem to find an empty box with the name though...

3
For those of us who are drug addicts, overroasting is a double problem. Not only does it ruin the flavor, it also destroys a larger percentage of the caffeine. A light roast leaves more caffeine intact.

4
Personally, I'm a tea drinker. Coffee smells heavenly, but the taste is shockingly different. At least tea doesn't pull a bait and switch on you.
Now, if somebody could come up with a beverage that tastes like coffee smells, I'd switch to it in an instant.
I suspect what's going on here, is that the people making the decisions are so deep into the product, and have been for so long, that they get jaded, and make their decisions on that basis. Like this fad for acidic wines. I swear, my sister gave me a bottle of wine a couple years ago that was more acidic than the vinegar I normally use!